This site depends strongly on GitHub infrastructure, and a number of operational decisions have been made during the development process that may not be obvious to a casual or new contributor.
These are described below.
HPC-Intro is currently on GitHub. You need a GitHub account to contribute. In addition, in order to get write access to the repository ("repo"), you will need to become a member of the HPC Intro Maintainers team, which lives inside the "carpentries-incubator" project.
See also the instructions for contributing.
There is also an HPC Carpentry GitHub project, which has other HPC-related lessons repos in its scope, and separate teams of maintainers and administrators.
In particular, there is a "coordination" repo, which is a good scope for issues and concerns for the HPC carpentry community at large, rather than any particular lesson.
There is also a repo for the main website covering all HPC-Carpentry activities. This is intended to be the "front door" of the HPC Carpentry community.
The main Carpentries Slack channel is reachable at swcarpentry.slack.com. To become a member, you can trigger in invitation from here.
You can go directly to the HPC Carpentry sub-channel at #hpc-carpentry. These are the things to bookmark — once you go there, the Slack engine redirects you to particular views, so copying and pasting URLs out of the browser's location bar is likely to be disappointing.
Members of existing swcarpentry Slack channels can find the channel by typing "hpc-carpentry" into the Slack search box.
The top-level site is on The Carpentries' Topicbox. There are two HPC-specific lists, "discuss-hpc" and "maintainers-hpc". These mailing lists are public: you may join any that catch your interest. The system does not use passwords; log-ins are via a verification code sent to your e-mail.
There is a web-hook that calls out to Zenodo to create a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) whenever a release is generated on the GitHub repo. The Zenodo account is owned by Peter Steinbach (@psteinb).
The high-level lesson structure is described reasonably well in the README file, but there are some subtleties that can arise at build-time.
You can locally preview some of the tests by providing arguments to
the make command that you run in the top-level directory. In
particular, make lesson-check-all checks a number of important
things, like the existence of files with appropriate metadata. The
actual checks are executed by the Python script in
bin/lesson_check.py, which can be examined for important clues.
You can control what sorts of checks a file will be subject to by
selecting a checker type in the list of regular-expression matches
assigned to CHECKERS near the bottom of bin/lesson_check.py.